50 Empathy Quotes That Will Show You Its True Meaning

Here are 50 empathy quotes that will show you what it really means to empathize:

1. Empathy depends not only on one’s ability to identify someone else’s emotions but also on one’s capacity to put oneself in the other person’s place and to experience an appropriate emotional response. – Charles G. Morris
2. Empathy is a connection; it’s a ladder out of the shame hole. – Brene Brown
3. Empathy is how kind hearts breathe. – Nitya Prakash
4. Money is not the root of all evil. A lack of empathy is. – Cole Todd
5. This capacity for empathy leads to a genuine encounter – we have to progress toward this culture of encounter – in which heart speaks to heart. – Pope Francis
6. You should not judge; you should understand. – Ernest Hemingway
7. If you judge people, you have no time to love them. – Mother Teresa
8. One of the most important aspects of being a human being, is being able to be in a relationship. Being able to successfully form and maintain a relationship. And at the heart of that capability is the capacity to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes, to see the world how they see it. That capacity is empathy. – Bruce Perry
9. Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you’ll be a mile away and have his shoes. – Steve Martin
10. There’s something in everyone only they know. – Ben Harper
11. Never look down on anybody unless you’re helping him up. – Jesse Jackson
12. The state of empathy, or being empathic, is to perceive the internal frame of reference of another with accuracy and with the emotional components and meanings which pertain thereto as if one were the person. – Carl Roger
13. Empathy is forgetting oneself in the joys and sorrows of another, so much so that you actually feel that the joy or sorrow experienced by another is your own joy and sorrow. Empathy involves complete identification with another.  – Dada Vaswani
14. If you find yourself saying ‘But I’m just being honest’, chances are you’ve just been unkind. Honesty doesn’t heal. Empathy does. – Dan Waldschmidt
15. A focus on empathy is just what is needed to make the world a better place for all animals, humans, and nonhuman alike. – Marc Bekoff
16. We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer. – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
17. All men are born firstly with the instinct to protect themselves. But few grow to really love themselves, and even fewer learn to love their neighbor as themselves. – Criss Jami
18. It doesn’t hurt to show some empathy. – John Cornyn
19. If you look into someone’s face long enough, eventually you’re going to feel that you’re looking at yourself. – Paul Auster
20. Empathy is the gateway; compassion is the way. – Scott Perry
21. An exchange of empathy provides an entry point for a lot of people to see what healing feels like. – Tarana Burke
22. Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eye for an instant? – Henry David Thoreau
23. Sometimes all a person wants is an empathetic ear; all he or she needs is to talk it out. Just offering a listening ear and an understanding heart for his or her suffering can be a big comfort. – Roy T. Bennett
24. The greatest cruelty is our casual blindness to the despair of others. – Anonymous
25. Empathy is the greatest virtue. From it, all virtues flow. Without it, all virtues are an act. – Eric Zorn
26. Empathy speaks to us in those silent moments, away from our wounded ego and our wondering heart, in those empty spaces where questions run riot like lost and rejected soldiers… it tells us that each soul is worthy, valued, loved, and honored and we only ever need to face our own shadows, our own pain… and to be our own mirror. – Christine Evangelou
27. I believe empathy is the most essential quality of civilization. – Roger Ebert
28. I always think that if you look at anyone in detail, you will have empathy for them because you recognize them as a human being, no matter what they’ve done. – Andrea Arnold
29. We cannot transform negativity into the positive without empathy, and we cannot truly understand empathy without experiencing it in our present life, in our past, and in our future. – Brian L. Weiss
30. Empathy nurtures wisdom. Apathy cultivates ignorance. – Suzy Kassem
31. Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. – Jonathan Franzen
32. We need to teach our children empathy and care and love and communication and social responsibility in preparation for adulthood. – Maya Soetoro-Ng
33. The greater good is achieved by not only telling people what they need to know but also filling them with a sense of empathy and love. – Abigail Disney
34. Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. – Plato
35. Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself.  – Mohsin Hamid
36. Each person you meet is an aspect of yourself, clamoring for love. – Eric Micha’el Leventhal
37. If bullies actually believe that somebody loves them and believes in them, they will love themselves, they will become better people, and many will even become saviors to the bullied. – Dan Pearce
38. The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy, we can all sense a mysterious connection to each other. – Meryl Streep
39. Empathy begins with understanding life from another person’s perspective. Nobody has an objective experience of reality. It’s all through our own individual prisms. – Sterling K. Brown
40. No one reaches out to you for compassion or empathy so you can teach them how to behave better. They reach out to us because they believe in our capacity to know our darkness well enough to sit in the dark with them. – Brene Brown
41. We need to understand the other side to impact the other side. We become much more effective as humans and leaders when we engage in hearty conversations with those who are different from us, not necessarily to change our opinions, but to build the empathy muscle. – Daniel Lubetzky
42. Empathy requires knowing that you know nothing. – Leslie Jamison
43. Yet, taught by time, my heart has learned to glow for other’s good, and melt at other’s woe. – Homer
44. Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around. – Leo Buscaglia
45. Have compassion and empathy in your heart. Many people are suffering deep emotional anguish beneath the surface of their lives, and smile even as they hurt inside. – Jim Palmer
46. If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. – Frederick Buechner
47. One does not remember one’s own pain. It is the suffering of others that undoes us. – Anna Funder
48. You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself. – John Steinbeck
49. One doesn’t have to operate with great malice to do great harm. The absence of empathy and understanding is sufficient. – Charles M. Blow
50. The real test of love is loving those who we feel are the hardest ones to love. – Criss Jami